Slightly off-topic for a beer blog, but I thought this was an interesting read nonetheless:
BREAKING: Behavioral economists at Caltech attached an EEG to the heads of 21 volunteers who knew not much about wine, fed them one milliliter of wine through a tube and the only thing they told them about the price, which wasn’t always accurate! Guess which one they always thought was better? The more expensive one, even when it was the same wine!
For a summary of this study, check out this BBC account, the best I’ve seen (with blog-worthy reader feedback too! And thanks to readers Grayman, Brian, Stephen and Terry for sending in versions of the story.).
Unfortunately using price as a proxy for quality happens all the time in the world of wine. That’s why, for example, Ace of Spades $300 nonvintage Champagne sells out when it tastes remarkably like the $50 version from the same producer. Hmm, maybe that’s why no samples of it were available during Vinexpo, a savvy crowd of trade tasters? Examples also abound of new producers who release wines at high prices in an attempt to signal quality that may or may not be there.
But, fortunately, price and quality are not always perfectly related. Just last month I poured two wines for participants at a tasting. One was quite a storied Napa producer and another was an unheralded producer from some dustbowl in Spain. They could see the bottles and some knew the Napa name. Which did they prefer? The Spanish one. And when I told them it was $15 vs $115, they rejoiced!
(Via Dr Vino’s wine blog.)
Dr. Vino is not publishing a beer blog (obviously), but I have to think that the same behavioral patterns would be evident in beer drinkers. Obviously the price difference between a $4 six pack (or whatever Bud Light goes for these days) and a $15 750ml bottle are not quite as drastic as you’d find in the wine world, but among a certain set of beer drinkers, I have little doubt that they see a price tag as a definite indicator of taste.
In many cases, I think that’s probably true, to a point. But there are some good beers out there that can be had for a moderate price (I’ve found several very good six packs in the $7-8 range). I think that beer style has a much greater influence on whether a drinker will like the brew, but within a style, the quality of the malts and hops (and thus the end cost of the beer) definitely can lead to big differences in the end product. Budweiser may be piss, but there are lagers that are actually quite good.